The Bolsheviks’ response to the Kronstadt sailors’ 15-point programme was a mix of hostility and panic. Two senior Bolsheviks, Mikhail Kalinin and N.N. Kuzmin, were sent to speak to the sailors and persuade them to withdraw their demands. But when Kalinin and Kuzmin delivered inflammatory speeches to a mass meeting of 15,000 people in Anchor Square, during which they called the Kronstadt programme counter-revolutionary and threatened those who supported it with severe reprisals, they were driven off the platform by a chorus of booing and had to hurriedly leave the city. The breakdown of the meeting put Kronstadt and the government on a collision course.
On top of this the situation in Petrograd was deteriorating. Berkman recorded in his diary that in Petrograd on 1st March, the day Kalinin and Kuzmin were threatening the sailors, “Many arrests are taking place. Groups of strikers surrounded by Chekists, on their way to prison, are a common sight”.12 Calls for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly were heard once more throughout working-class districts of Petrograd. By 4th March the entire city was under martial law.
Faced with a mass working-class rebellion, the Bolsheviks responded with accusations that the Mensheviks and SRs were behind it all, plotting “counter-revolution”. But the Mensheviks and SRs followed, not led, mass action. Menshevik sympathisers in the Printers Union helped them produce a series of leaflets supporting the strikes. On 27th February an unsigned manifesto that almost certainly originated with the Mensheviks appeared around the city, declaring
a fundamental change is necessary in the policies of the government. First of all, the workers and peasants need freedom. They do not want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks. They want to control their own destinies. Comrades, support the revolutionary order. In an organised and determined manner demand: liberation of all arrested socialists and non–party working men; abolition of martial law; freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labour; free elections of factory committees, trade unions and Soviets. Call meetings, pass resolutions, send delegates to authorities, bring about the realization of your demands.13
By early 1921 the Mensheviks had regained the mass support they had lost between February and October 1917, yet they still did not advocate the violent overthrow of the Bolshevik government. Instead they asked workers to organise legally to secure political and economic reforms.
The Mensheviks had limited opportunity to organise behind these demands. Few of their leaders were still at large. Those that were, like Rozovsky and Dan, were arrested in early March. In the first three months of 1921 approximately 5,000 Mensheviks were arrested by the Cheka, including the entire Menshevik Central Committee that the British Labour Party delegation had been allowed to visit six months before. By contrast, the SRs issued leaflets that called for a mass uprising, the overthrow of Sovnarcom and the recall of the Constituent Assembly. The Kronstadt sailors themselves did not want that, nor any restoration of bourgeois rule. The “Red Sailors” had been amongst those who closed down the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, when they still believed the Bolsheviks best represented their vision of the future society. They did not backtrack now. Even after the Bolshevik military force attacked on 7th March, the sailors continued to build their democratic socialist commune, dismantling the despised RCP apparatus in the city and preparing for genuine trade union and Soviet elections.
On 8th March the Kronstadt Revolutionary Committee published a statement in its paper called “What we are fighting for”. It explained:
By carrying out the October Revolution the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation. But the result has been an even greater enslavement of human beings. The power of the monarchy, with its police and its gendarmerie, has passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who have given the people not freedom but the constant fear of torture by the Cheka.
After condemning the dictatorship of the party, one–man management and Taylorism, the statement finished by decrying
the moral servitude which the Communists have also introduced. They have laid their hands on the inner world of the toiling people, forcing them to think in the way that they want. Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines […] To the protests of the peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers, whose living conditions have compelled them to strike, they have answered with mass executions […] The Russia of the toilers, the first to raise the red banner of liberation, is drenched in blood.14
The clock was now ticking down. Once the ice sheet between Petrograd and Kotlin Island thawed, the naval base would be virtually impregnable. It might then become a focus for other anti-Bolshevik forces such as Makhno’s anarchist partisans, the peasant army of Tambov or the strikers of Petrograd and Moscow. The danger was so tangible that the Bolsheviks unleashed a torrent of hostile propaganda about the Kronstadt rebels, some of which is still repeated today by their staunchest defenders. None of it was true.
The sailors were not déclassé elements; not depoliticised since 1917; not led by anarchists; not backward peasant recruits from Ukraine replacing the good proletarians of a few years before. On the two main foci of the rebellion, the battleships Petropovlovsk and Sebastopol, 94% of their crews had been recruited before and during the 1917 revolutions. 59% of the crews had joined the navy between 1914 and 1916.15 The rebels had no counter-revolutionary programme. They had no connections with White émigrés or foreign agents, and received no money or aid from them. On the contrary, they vehemently rejected that which was offered. Getzler quotes a Red Cross representative (who, towards the end, the rebels allowed in) as confirming that Kronstadt “will admit no White political party, no politician, with the exception of the Red Cross”.16 There were no secret White generals inside Kronstadt directing the revolt. The senior eximperial officer at the base, General Kozlovsky, was a military advisor to the Soviet in the same manner that thousands of other ex-imperial officers were advising the Red Army. The accusation that the sailors were discredited by the presence of Kozlovsky, who played no part in the fighting, when the Bolshevik forces sent against them were commanded by the ex-imperial officer General Tukchachevsky, was hypocrisy of a high order.
On 4th March the Petrograd Soviet, consisting entirely of RCP delegates, “mostly youngsters, fanatical and intolerant” (as Berkman, watching from the gallery, recorded), condemned the Kronstadt rebels. Representatives from Petrograd factories attempted to support the sailors but were shouted down. Kalinin claimed that Kronstadt was the centre of a plot orchestrated by Kozlovsky. After a short “debate” the Soviet declared the sailors were counter-revolutionary and demanded their immediate surrender. Trotsky, who had been called back to Petrograd to direct operations, sent the sailors one short communication.
Grimly titled “Ultimatum: March 5th, 1921, 1400 Hours”, Trotsky’s message said, “The Workers and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the insurgent battleships must be restored to the jurisdiction of the Soviet Republic without delay”. After demanding the rebels immediately lay down their arms and release the commissars held at the base, it concluded:
Only those who surrender unconditionally can count on the mercy of the Soviet Republic. I am issuing orders to quell the mutiny and subdue the mutineers by force of arms. Total responsibility for whatever calamities may befall the civilian population in this operation is on the heads of the White Guard insurrectionists. This is the last warning.17